


in your love my salvation lies

by lily_pearl (lilyandjoey), lilyandjoey



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Infidelity, Love Triangle, Post-Deathly Hallows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:49:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyandjoey/pseuds/lily_pearl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyandjoey/pseuds/lilyandjoey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the war Harry, Ron and Hermione are adrift. Too much time in each others company and under pressure has taken it's toll in unexpected ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in your love my salvation lies

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [](http://community.livejournal.com/hp_triangle/profile)[**hp_triangle**](http://community.livejournal.com/hp_triangle/) . Can be read as trio fic or as a more conventional love triangle. (Title taken from the song _Orange Skies_ by Alexi Murdoch).

It wasn't until the dust settled and normal life was expected to resume that Hermione realised that she was no longer sure what exactly normal life was. Her life had been anything but normal since the age of eleven when she received her first letter by owl post. Whilst it may have come as a shock to many of her classmates, Hermione had never made plans for the future or thought about what she wanted to do for a career. At first she had been far too focussed on the classes themselves to think about their practical applications. Then she had been too focussed on keeping Harry alive to think about much else. More than anything, she had discovered, war changes a person irretrievably.

Hermione and Harry had stayed with the Weasleys in the immediate aftermath of the war, helping to rebuild the charred remains of the family home. Hermione had learnt far more about the practical applications of magic than she had expected. It was a strange experience to find that most of your knowledge was either hypothetical at best or only useful for survival, subterfuge and war. It had felt comforting to be learning again (even outside the classroom) and a full day's hard physical work left even the most troubled mind blank. Sleep came easily.

She had kissed Ron impulsively while their school and erstwhile home came tumbling down around their heads. Now she found herself living in much the same way – on impulse. And kissing Ron, of course. Somehow, when they were meant to be repairing something broken or fetching supplies, Hermione and Ron would find themselves kissing desperately in an alcove or a field beyond the house or an alleyway in the village or the next town over. Where previously Hermione would have worried about being caught, she now felt no such qualms. She felt only Ron's lips, teeth and tongue, his hands tangled in her hair, his strong shoulders under her own hands.

It wasn't until the Burrow was restored (not entirely as it had been but as close as could be managed) that the impact of the war really hit home. Hermione found herself at a loose end that no amount of frantic fumbling with Ron could distract her from. She had trouble sleeping on the put-up bed in Ginny's little room. She found herself missing the tent, the sounds of Ron and Harry sleeping and the knowledge that one or other of them was keeping watch. Sometimes she even longed for the nights where she had been the sleepless one, watching for signs of the enemy. Ginny's room smelt feminine and unfamiliar and Ginny herself snuffled quietly while she slept, but Hermione longed for the comforting smell of teenage boy and the sound of heavy snoring.

She crept downstairs in the middle of the night to find Harry at the kitchen table. There were dark rings around his eyes and she felt a pang of guilt that she hadn't noticed his suffering amidst the waves of suffering around them. They spent that night on the living room sofa, curled around each other in sleep until Ron woke them at dawn. To Hermione's surprise, they weren't treated to one of Ron's usual irrational displays of jealousy. Instead, he gently suggested that they go back to bed before anyone else woke up.

Harry and Hermione spent the next three nights sleeping on the sofa, waking up early in a tangle of limbs to climb wearily up the stairs and slip into bed. After much debate, the two of them and Ron decided it was time to move on. They had all felt useful whilst the Burrow was being restored and needed a new challenge now that it was done. By the end of the week they had packed their meagre possessions and returned to 12 Grimmauld Place. All three of them agreed that the house had a morbid air to it that Ron's mother's diligent work some years before had failed to dispel. Harry was determined not to let the place go. He didn't have to tell the others that the desire had more to do with Sirius than any love of the house itself.

All three of them still had trouble sleeping, Harry and Hermione more so than Ron. For the first few nights it felt like they were camping again: living out of backpacks and sleeping in sleeping bags. They tackled what had been the spare bedrooms first. They were the easiest to deal with as they were well-furnished but held no personal possessions. None of them felt right about occupying Sirius' room, Regulus' room or Mr and Mrs Black's room. The bedrooms needed cleaning, re-painting and new linen on the beds which was easily achieved and the three friends soon had their own bedrooms.

Even so, it was rare for all three of them to wake up in their own rooms. Some nights Hermione crawled into bed with Harry or Ron. Some nights one of them crawled in with her. They would wake up in a tangle of limbs, hot and confused. When she woke up with Harry it should have felt awkward compared with waking up next to Ron, but it never did. She put it down to their long friendship and those weeks alone in the tent. On one of the few mornings when Hermione woke in her own room alone, she went to look for Ron. He wasn't in his room so she padded down the hall to Harry's room. The two boys were crammed into Harry's tiny bed. They were both sleeping soundly, with Ron on top of the duvet and Harry under it. She smiled and closed the door silently behind them. One particularly bad night, in the first week, all three of them had slept in a pile on the living room floor under a mass of sleeping bags and duvets.

Over the weeks that followed the three of them worked hard to remove not only the traces of dark magic, but general signs of neglect and decay. They left the house only to buy supplies – food, cleaning products, paint – and kept very much to themselves. They slowly transformed the house, working on the more difficult rooms together and the easier ones individually or in pairs. Ron and Hermione resumed their trysts in cupboards and alcoves, finding all the secret places in the old house as they went.

It was after three weeks that everything changed irrevocably. Ron had gone to buy groceries while Harry and Hermione painted the room that had once been Regulus' bedroom. It had taken them a few days to go through all of his possessions and decide what to do with them. It was strange seeing the room empty but it had to be done. Harry had been in a sombre mood all morning so it came as a surprise to Hermione when he suddenly started laughing. She looked at him quizzically and he indicated a spot on her face. When she didn't move, he walked over and wiped a smudge of paint from her cheek. An eternal moment passed with the two of them face to face, mere inches apart, and then they were kissing with a fervour that surprised them both.

By the time Ron came back, they had resumed painting and were chatting easily. Hermione was surprised and a little concerned at how easily the deception came to her. Later, she rationalised it to herself. She and Ron had never made any promises to each other or made any attempt to discuss the nature of their relationship. Just because she had kissed him first didn't mean she couldn't kiss Harry too. The words rang hollow even in her head, but that didn't stop her from responding when Harry dragged her into a cupboard and pushed her up against the wall.

The next few weeks followed something of a pattern (albeit one that certainly couldn't last). The three of them carried on their project, refurbishing one room at a time what had once been the Black family home and would now be Harry's. They swapped beds on a regular basis, always starting out in their respective rooms only to migrate during the night and wake up somewhere new in the morning. Hermione found herself dragged into at least one secret place each day by either Harry or Ron. She wondered whether either of them knew what she was doing with the other. She should have felt some guilt, but she was still living on impulse and it was a heady experience to be wanted by both of them. She wondered how long it would be until one of them decided it was time to stop being secretive – and how angry they would be when they found out the truth.

In the end it was Ron who decided he wanted to go public. They went over for dinner at the Burrow and Ron held her hand for all to see. To Hermione's surprise, the fireworks she had been expecting never came. Harry barely batted an eyelid. The next day when he pulled her into the hidden passage on the second floor of his house Hermione thought that this was going to be the moment she had been dreading. That he would threaten to tell Ron or ask her how she could treat him this way. Instead, he kissed her just as fiercely as always and she responded in kind. By the time he pulled away and they had to go back out into the main house, she knew that he intended for them to continue as before.

It was then that she realised that he had known about Ron all along.


End file.
